NP: D.C. United vs. San Jose Earthquakes

The news came out about a week and a half ago that Microsoft would play with logos and favicons in their paid search listings. Now, normally I respond badly to efforts to make unobtrusive search ads more obtrusive, but this might actually do something useful.

There's long been antagonism between certain brands and their resellers with regard to bidding on those brand keywords and using those brand names in search ads. If Microsoft is able to successfully integrate a small rendering of a logo -- I really like the favicon idea, maybe anchored in the corner of the current ad space -- it could serve as a handy way to differentiate between the two. If only the trademark owner gets to use the logo, then you've got a convenient visual way in introduce separation.

Obviously, there could be downsides. Successful resellers/affiliates might see their costs increase as the trademark owner gets the CPC benefit of (presumably) a higher click-through rate. Or the rules might be too muddy and the graphics too large. But in a medium where innovation is severely constrained by format, this seems like it might just work if done properly. And if it does easy the brand/reseller tension, it could definitely bring more advertisers to the Bing platform, which is one piece of what Bing needs to do in order to compete with Google.

This doesn't really affect the other half, which is finding ways to get more people searching for more keywords that generate more ads. Search engines like to pretend that more efficient advertising actually attracts users, but I'm still really, really skeptical of that claim.